


Like the Second Coming

by story_monger



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-13
Updated: 2012-12-13
Packaged: 2017-11-21 01:54:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/592140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/story_monger/pseuds/story_monger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Smith is a perfectly boring accountant with floppy hair who wears bow ties. Then he meets the ginger, Scottish Time Lady with the TARDIS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like the Second Coming

About a third of his way through life, John Smith figured out why his existence had been so—well, predictable could have been the term for it.

  
It wasn’t for a lack of effort. When asked, for example, he announced that his favorite food was fish fingers and custard. And on his 24th birthday, he’d armed himself with a small pair of scissors and hair gel, and attacked his mop of hair with gusto, if not expertise. It had to be like Michelangelo’s sculptures, his reasoning went. Remove everything that didn’t look like a cool haircut.

  
The result drove him to the nearest, cheapest salon in a woolen hat in the middle of June, earned him a legitimate gasp from the hairdresser, and a final hairstyle he could only describe as “floppy.”

  
Still, he kept it out of a mild hope that it would serve as a conversation starter.

  
Then there were the jackets that looked like they’d come from a university professor’s closet, complete with elbow pads. He’d found the first jacket at a used clothing store and bought it on a lark. How that had progressed to suspenders and bowties, he wasn’t entirely sure.

  
“I wear a bowtie now. Bowties are cool,” he’d grinned to his coworkers when he first showed up in the complete ensemble. He thought it a bit of a tragedy that no one even cracked a smile.

  
(The fez merely got him a talk with the supervisor.)

  
But he made a habit out of looking like someone’s university professor at least once a week, because at least it was different.

  
And god knew he needed it. With a name like John Smith, with a job like an accountant, with a perfectly average flat on the outskirts of London, with a perfectly normal history of nice-but-not-entirely-serious girlfriends, he desperately needed different.

  
He knew that much. He just didn’t know it’d show up in the form of a magic blue box whirling across the sky.

  
When it did show up, John realized with utter clarity that everyone had a quota of odd and amazing events for their lifetime. His had just all been gathered together in one event which hit him like the second coming. That was why when he saw the box, he had to follow it, the same way he had to breath.

 

 

She was ginger and freckled and sounded Scottish. Also probably mad. Definitely mad. She was going on about living statues, but John listened because this was different. This was so different that it had turned the corner and felt almost expected.

  
“The angels?” he asked, as if he had a prayer of following the conversation. They were crouched at the end of an alley, facing a rusty door. She scowled and produced a small metal stick, which began to buzz and glow green at one end. She ran the glowing end along the rusted door, causing a loud crack and clang of metal.

  
“The angels,” she confirmed, kicking the door open and grabbing his hand again. “I’d explain why they’re so dangerous, but I it’s a lot of timey-wimey things you wouldn’t understand.”

  
“Who says I wouldn’t understand?” John asked, following her into the dark interior that reeked of mildew and abandonment. He heard her curse, then the light at the end of her stick grew brighter, casting a sickly green light around them.

  
“Right,” she said, glancing back at him. “We’ve got one rule. Can you remember one rule?”

  
“Pretty certain,” he said. He jerked slightly when she pulled him around to face her directly.

  
“Don’t,” she enunciated, “blink. When you see them, don’t blink. Don’t look away because they’ll move faster than you can imagine.” She scrutinized him. “Can you repeat that?”

  
“Don’t blink. Don’t look away,” John recited. “From who?”

  
“From them, you stupid idiot,” she said in a low voice, her eyes suddenly focused on something over his shoulder. John turned and let out a (manly) yelp at the stone face hovering inches over him. It was a stone angel, its face twisted in a grotesque mask and its arms reaching towards him.

  
“Oh,” he said weakly. “Those angels.”

  
“This is fantastic,” he heard her say brightly beside him. “The screwdriver only indicated two of them in the area, you see, and if this one’s occupied, that only leaves half as much a chance for me being stuck in the '60s again. Unless it misread, but we’ll cross our fingers, aye? I need you to stay here and stare at it. Don’t look away, no matter what happens. You understand?”

  
“Stare?” John asked in a thin voice. “What if I blink?”

  
“Don’t,” she advised, then turned as if to go. There came a moment of hesitation, then a hand landed on his shoulder. John didn’t dare glance towards it, but he felt it squeeze.

  
“I didn’t ask—what’s you name?”

  
“John Smith,” he replied. The hand patted his shoulder.

  
“John Smith, you are a brave, remarkable man, and I promise you will be home in time to…watch the match or whatever blokes do in this century.” John didn’t watch many sports as a rule, but he appreciated the sentiment.

  
Then she was gone, and John was left in a staring contest with an alien-statue-angel.

  
He couldn’t have said how much time had passed when a sound like a broken engine echoed across the empty room. A door banged open and John chanced a glance around him.

  
“Don’t look away I said!” her voice roared, and John flinched back just in time to see the stony fingers millimeters from his face.

  
“Ugh, by all that’s holy, John Smith, you are a miracle,” the Scottish voice announced. “That’s the only way I can explain that. A bloody miracle, you stupid idiot.” Shuffles. “Right. I’m right behind you; back up slowly and keep your eyes on the angel.” John did so, his heart ramming against his chest in equal parts alarm and sheer relief. He nearly stumbled when his heels met something hard, but then hands were on his shoulder, guiding him into some kind of doorway.

  
“When I say so, close the doors,” she instructed, before there followed a great deal of clacking and whirring and that dying machine sound again.  
“Now!” she roared, and John slammed the doors shut just as the floor gave an almighty lurch. He fell backwards and heard her whoop over the sound of the wheezing machine.

  
John scrambled to a stand and then gaped at the vast room in which he stood. The ginger woman was grinning like a wildcat over a console of machinery.  
“I’m the Doctor,” she announced, then gestured grandly. “Welcome to the TARDIS.”

 

 

It began like that. Afterwards came a long series of planets and histories and sentient races John could never have dreamed of. He moved through it like it was the best dream he’d ever managed and he was working not to wake up and lose it all.

  
The Doctor blazed at the center of it, she and that spinning, blue box. It was her who guided him in and then out of extreme peril, her voice that mixed with his when they stumbled back into the TARDIS, sweaty and laughing.

  
She was an odd one. A brilliant, amazing kind of odd. And John would have been lying if he’d claimed not to be a little bit in love with her. She never showed anything bordering interest, though, treating him more like a puppy or favorite nephew she had picked up.

  
She had her nicknames for him. Stupid idiot was most prominent. John didn’t think this was entirely fair. True, she was much more clever than him, but she’d also had 900 more years of living. He wasn’t stupid.

  
“I only call you that when you act like an idiot,” she told him, cheerfully slinging one arm around his shoulder after a narrow escape from a small planet whose name translated into “Pit of Reeking Death.” “Really, you oughtn’t have held your hand out like that. Asking for confrontation.”

  
“I was trying to be peaceful,” John groaned, but the Doctor only laughed and suggested a visit to the 30th century to cheer him up.

  
Usually, almost always, she was like a dervish. Ginger hair flying, mouth in a perpetual smirk, eyes bright and open. But then there were the moments when she looked so innumerably sad that John felt like an intruder just seeing her expression. The reasons—there were many reasons—came out slowly over time, and by then John would have been lying if he said he wasn’t a little terrified of the Doctor as well.

  
But mostly, she ran around spouting babble and doing things without entirely thinking them through, calling John “my stupid idiot,” and teasing him for his dress sense.

  
“You look stupid in that,” she’d announced more than once. “Fezes are only funny for so long.”

  
“I like it,” he’d always defend himself. “Not all of us have your legs.”

  
“But the bowtie?” she asked.

  
“Bowties,” he said firmly, “are cool.”

  
It was times like that when he forgot that he was an accountant on the run from his own life, accompanying a 900 year old, ginger Time Lady.  
“If you’re from another planet,” he asked once he learned of the Doctor’s origins, “why do you sound Scottish?”

  
“Why do you sound like you’re from the eastern continent?” she asked back. This didn’t answer anything, and John didn’t have time to point this out because then the TARDIS lurched and threw them in the middle of the Aztec empire.

  
And then, sometimes, after a truly harrowing event, they didn’t come back into the TARDIS laughing like maniacs. Instead they remained silent as the Doctor sent the TARDIS back into the time vortex and sometimes, when it felt right, John would walk over and silently wrap his arms around her. She always returned the action, and they’d stand there in the dim lights of the TARDIS, not letting go until it felt safe. John couldn’t always tell who was comforting whom in these moments. He often felt as if he were seeking the protection of a mother and allaying the deep fears of a child simultaneously.

  
It was times like this, his nose buried in her shoulder and her hand resting on the back of his head, when John felt like he best and least understood the Doctor.

  
His Doctor. His brilliant, mad Doctor. Forever may she travel.


End file.
